A prickly silence lay between the two interlocutors. Adam said nothing, but was thinking that Samuel was about to confide in him and that his confidence would oblige Adam to respond in kind, an eventuality Adam was trying to forestall for the sake of the “name under reserve” and the secret contained in the Blue-Bound Notebook. Samuel’s muteness was slightly alarming: true, the muscles of his face had relaxed, as though fatigued from maintaining the actor’s mask, but now they were rearranging themselves to suggest yet another expression, this one grave and morose.
— Don’t worry, it isn’t Solveig Amundsen! he repeated at last. I’m going to tell all; I want to give you a lesson in frankness.
— Me? asked Adam apprehensively.
— Yes, you! said Samuel with energy. Do you think nobody notices you posing like Hamlet with a head cold every time the brat looks at you? Haven’t I seen you break out in an Othellian sweat whenever anyone mentions the brat’s name?
— You’re crazy! Adam Buenosayres managed a laugh. (“Look out, look out!”)
— And today, Thursday, why have you ruined a philosopher’s sleep? added Samuel. To fish for information about Saavedra and find out what I’ve seen or heard in that grotto of delights!
Sharp as awls were the eyes that impaled the visitor, and Adam’s eyes wobbled under the weight of so much truth. The philosopher, sensitive to the other’s embarrassment, desisted from severity and switched to mercy:
— No, brother! It’s time porteños overcame their stupid reserve. The thirty-two foreign philosophers who dishonoured us with their visits, who took Buenos Aires’s pulse and inserted a thermometer into her anal orifice, finally came up with the diagnosis that our city is sad.23 Reasons? They didn’t give any. They were too busy stuffing themselves with our famous chilled beef. The gringos didn’t realize that Buenos Aires is an archipelago of men, all islands unto themselves.
Samuel laughed malevolently:
— What I can’t understand is how our great Macedonio, living in Buenos Aires, could come to this astounding metaphysical conclusion: “The world is an I-less soul-idarity.”24 God forgive him his neologisms. Under the same circumstances, I draw a very different conclusion.
— What conclusion? the visitor wanted to know.
— This one — round, musical, and meaningfuclass="underline" “The world’s a fartful I-ness.”
He stopped a moment, apparently to meditate on the profundity of his maxim, then scrutinized his visitor as if to gauge how amazed he was by so much brilliance. And Adam Buenosayres’s wonderment must not have been scant, for Samuel Tesler returned to his theme:
— Now then, he announced, between generous and bitter. I, a European, am going to take the initiative. I’ll speak to you with brutal frankness.25
— It must be a hair-raising story, Adam laughed. How did your romance start?
— Ah! growled Samuel. That’s what I ask myself, metaphysical animal that I am.
He fell into a studied silence, behind which could be discerned a feverish preparation for his next histrionic move. Then, leaving the window, he picked up the chamber pot from his bedside table and stood there urinating into it, with a dignity Diogenes Laërtius would have attributed to his namesake, the one in the barrel. A harmonious lament issued from the urinaclass="underline" a deep crescendo was followed by a sharp decrescendo, petering out in the final musical drops. The philosopher put the recipient back in its place, sat down on the unmade bed, and asked his visitor point-blank:
— How would you define love, if I asked you to?
— Oh no you don’t! protested Adam. Don’t come to me asking for definitions!
— I’m not asking you for the kind of nitwitted definition you’d get out of Reader’s Digest. I’m looking for something transcendental, a definition in three bound volumes.
— You’ve got some nerve if you’re expecting anything of the kind from me!
Samuel Tesler lowered his head to signal his dismay.
— O world, o world! he sighed. What has happened to sacred Philography?26
— What if you give me your definition? proposed the visitor in a conciliatory spirit.
Samuel Tesler raised a professorial index finger:
— I won’t begin with a definition, but rather a methodology. Summarizing Plato’s ideas — although only on the plane of the earthly Venus, the real lollapalooza — I’ll say that love has two phases: the bedazzlement of the subject (me) upon seeing the beautiful form (Haydée Amundsen), followed by the anxious urge of the subject (me) to take possession of the beautiful form (Haydée Amundsen) in order to procreate in her beauty. Am I right?
— Too right! grumbled Adam. That second phase smacks of metaphysical obscenity.
— Anyway, Samuel reminded him, it’s clear that I, being well versed in the subject, had the right to be initiated according to the classical norms. Right or wrong?
— Right.
— Well then, declared the disconcerted philosopher, the thing happened to me backward!
— What do you mean, backward? demanded the visitor, likewise in consternation.
— I mean there was no initial bedazzlement, in spite of the methodology. I’m telling you, at first Haydée was nothing more to me than a topographical feature of Saavedra; she left me completely indifferent. In a word, I didn’t notice any symptoms betraying the penetration of one of the Imp’s arrows into the third space of my rib cage.
— Then what?
— Then, in the course of my metaphysical inquiry into primordial matter, I started observing all her gestures, poses, and grimaces. As you can see, it was merely out of scientific interest.
— Poor innocent schmuck! exclaimed Adam on the verge of laughter.